Sending out numerous applications but never seem to get any responses? Still waiting for that perfect job opportunity, which never seems to be advertised? Limited job opportunities presenting themselves? Studies have shown that between 70% to 80% of job opportunities are never advertised - termed the 'hidden job market'.

Below is a live recording of today’s webinar with Keith Keller and Annemarie Cross on “Tapping into the Hidden Job Market - Essential Online/Offline Networking Strategies” You can register for other upcoming webinars here

This webinar teaches crucial offline and online networking strategies that MUST be part of your job search and career management plan to get you in front of key decision makers for those unadvertised job opportunities.

Have you tried recruiting on Facebook? Do you manually click through profiles and post messages on group profiles? Guess what, you have already created your first mistake! If you are like most online recruiters, then more than likely you are concerned about how to grow traffic to your website and increase sales and placements.

Do you know how to pull profiles details such as skills, interests, current employer/role and qualifications into your database? Since March 2008, Recruitment Directory has led the way in creating Facebook Applications for Recruiters http://6rec.com/nu2t

This webinar will be presented by leading Online Recruitment Specialist, Thomas Shaw MRCSA, who has shown hundreds of recruiters how to effectively use Facebook as a recruiting tool.

Facebook is a talent goldmine and during this FREE webinar you will learn

How to search for candidates and build a larger, more diverse talent pool

Differences between - Profile vs Pages, Groups vs Applications

Different types of advertising models

Create brand extension, exposure & loyalty

Why Facebook Applications are the best for Recruiters

Facebook Connect

Tips & Tricks

By creating an application specifically for your recruitment agency, you can automatically display all your jobs, and allow users to share the job with their friends. All you need is a RSS feed and you can be online within a few hours.

The result can be viral. Once your job is posted on Facebook users can repeatedly install your own brand application which generates massive amounts of continuous traffic to your website and expands your brand to significant proportions.

Below is a live recording of today’s webinar with Keith Keller and Annemarie Cross on “Surviving a Redundancy: 10 strategies to get yourself and your career back on track” You can register for other upcoming webinars here

Loosing your job can be a frightening situation, particularly if you have been out of the job market for some time and unsure about the whole job search process.

Never before has it been more important to have a professional marketing document (your resume), a clear job search plan and action plan to support you in re-entering the job market with confidence. And, of equal importance is that you maintain a positive mind-set throughout your job search – something that’s becoming difficult to maintain with all the negative imagery being portrayed by the media.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is term that describes marketing a website using various techniques to make it more visible on search engines. Search Engine Marketing techniques include search engine optimization (SEO), buying Pay Per Click (PPC) ads or using a combination of both of these options.

SEO is a pre-requisite for effective SEM. It's the first part in the SEM process, and involves performing market research, defining and refining keyword phrases to maximize what SEO professionals refer to as "keyword density" and minimize the effects of "keyword dilution". More on SEO in a later blog post.

82% do not have an effective strategy for Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

74% do not have an effective strategy for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

It is important for Recruiters AND Employers to understand how SEM and SEO are an important to your marketing strategy. The main focus of both strategies is to produce far more search results thus increases visitors to your website!

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) involves a combination of free website submissions and paid search engine listings. It is an umbrella term combining SEO with paid methods of marketing such as PPC campaigns and any paid for appearances or inclusions on the internet. PPC or Pay Per Click involves online ads that you pay for each time someone clicks through the ad to get to your site.

As Recruitment is a very competitive market; for which there are thousands of other sites offering the same product or service. PPC is often a way to get on the front pages of search engines while you work on organic or natural search.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the art and science of increasing your website’s visibility to search engines for those important keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business.

Free versus Paid - You will need to decide which method of SEM marketing is going to suit your business. It is a good idea to have a mix of paid and free SEM. This way you can target users regardless of where they are in the search cycle.

Organic/Natural (Free) - There are ways to get listed for free on the Internet so that your business name will come up under various search engine queries. This method is called an organic or natual listing. An SEO search will rank the results according to how many times the keyword or key phrase, is found within the text of the document.

PPC (Pay Per Click) - With this method of online marketing, you pay a provider - such as Google or Yahoo!, a pre-determined amount of money you are willing to pay each time a visitor clicks on the link/advert.

PFI (Pay For Inclusion) - Directories are also maintained on the worldwide web. Depending on which directories are applicable to your business, the listings can cover broad topics or they can be more specific. Listings in some of these directories might be free, but more and more directories are beginning to charge a fee for your business to be included.

Feel free to join in on the conversation. All comments are moderated before publishing. Comments posted by subscribers don't necessarily reflect the views of Recruitment Directory.

mikec (11:03am Tuesday 19 May 2009)

Hi Thomas,

Awesome blog. We were at a seminar quite recently that talked about how the recruitment industry was lagging the chain when it came to effective SEM and SEO. One thing we learned here is that effective SEO can lead to cheaper SEM, because search engines like google reward you for good and relevant content on a destination page.

Mike
GradConnection

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Following up from our previous webinar "Using Twitter for Recruitment", Recruitment Directory is proud to present an advanced training session presented by leading Online Recruitment Specialist, Thomas Shaw. Nearly 800 people have listened to Thomas teach Recruiters the basic principles and techniques on how to use Twitter.

Did you know that since the first webinar, Recruiters have successfully used Twitter to fill roles making $$$! Are you one of those smart recruiters who can say… "I made a placement using Twitter”

I was not surprised by the findings for "Search Marketing and Social Media", infact the US is way ahead of Australia in sourcing via social networks and search engines. The Recruitment Genome Project 2009 Trends Survey uncovered this glaring truth: A large percentage of recruiters and recruitment strategy decision-makers are behind the curve when it comes to taking advantage of the kind of technology job candidates are moving toward.

85% do not have an effective strategy for finding candidates on blogs.

51% do not have an effective strategy for finding candidates on social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

53% do not have an effective strategy for finding candidates using major search engines such as Google or Live.com.

82% do not have an effective strategy for Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

74% do not have an effective strategy for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

As the report title states “Act While Others Wait”, signup for our Online Recruitment Webinars and learn how to use these mediums in your recruitment strategy.

The key findings of the report were:Respondents overwhelmingly will spend the same or less in 2009 on recruitment marketing strategies, technologies and training.

93% will spend the same or less on job boards.

81% will spend the same or less on recruiter training and development.

73% of respondents will spend the same or less on search marketing and social media change.

Recruitment goals are strongly believed to be tied to strategic business objectives, and recruitment marketing strategies are believed to be driving recruitment goals.

82% of respondents believe their recruitment goals are tied to their company’s strategic business objectives.

70% are satisfied that their company’s recruitment marketing strategy is driving the achievement of overall recruitment goals.

Companies don’t have good metrics to support their recruitment marketing decisions, but they won’t pay to improve them in 2009.

38% of survey participants feel they have the right metrics and reports to support their recruitment marketing decisions.

33% expect to improve their metrics in 2009.

Companies are lacking effective strategies for the most cost-effective recruitment solutions, which ironically are the strategies experts expect an increasing number of candidates to use.

15% of survey respondents have an effective strategy for finding candidates on blogs.

26% have an effective strategy for using SEO for recruitment; 18 percent for using SEM.

47% have an effective strategy for using social networks, and the same percentage for using major search engines.

A huge share of companies are dissatisfied with their job board performance, but a very small minority will invest more on improvements in 2009.

47% of respondents are dissatisfied with their overall job board performance.

9% will spend more on job posting solutions in 2009 over 2008.

A majority of companies are dissatisfied with their current recruiter and sourcing capability, but only a small percentage will pay more in 2009.

53% are dissatisfied with their current sourcing capability.

18% of survey respondents will spend more on recruiter and sourcing training and development n 2009.

An overwhelming majority of companies conduct direct marketing to candidates, but most don’t think their capabilities are up to the task.

55% of respondents conduct direct marketing to candidates.

51% are dissatisfied with their capabilities.

Although nearly all companies believe using the Internet is a key recruitment strategy, a huge majority handle the job internally, and nearly half feel their team is inadequately trained.

81% feel Internet sourcing is a major part of their recruitment strategy.

79% manage Internet sourcing internally.

47% feel their team has inadequate training on Internet research and sourcing.

Great news for all SEEK advertisers. They have changed the default job advert expiry length from 30 days to 45 days! Oh no, hang on... on second look, this only applies for jobs posted under the SEEK Ltd advertiser account.

The Strategy Analyst role currently live on SEEK was posted (refreshed) on 2nd April. Today is the 17th May, this equates to 45 days. I remember a post by Geoff Jennings last year SEEK Job Never Expire

Feel free to join in on the conversation. All comments are moderated before publishing. Comments posted by subscribers don't necessarily reflect the views of Recruitment Directory.

marketing (10:35am Tuesday 19 May 2009)

So Seek aren't entitled to change their own rules for their own website? This is your biggest complaint about Seek? - that they've have changed something about their own company, and that they use their own company to advertise their new staffing positions differently?

What should Seek do? hmmm... lets see....:
Hello Mr Seek,
Well Hello Mr Seek,
I have a job ad which is about to expire,
Why yes you do Mr Seek,
Could I perhaps pay myself to not have my job ad expire?
Why yes, yes you can
Wonderful now let me get my wallet out and pay myself to renew an ad for me.

If you do not encode special characters in web forms, you run the risk of breaking the search query or the ability to insert malicious code into the database. Hackers can infiltrate your website, potentially stealing confidential data or deleting the database. I am not going to go into the technical reasons why this happens, but in most cases it is a very easy fix.

Imagine the embarrassment when you could have spent a small amount of money, testing the website for errors!

Shit! Isn’t that what you pay your IT team to do?

Independent 3rd party testing is always advised to double check the website for errors. Contact us today to find more about our specialist consulting services. All these errors below are a result of us only using the following keyword – you’ll

You are able to drop this Recruitment Agency database if you wanted to...

It is becoming more difficult to maintain the same username across a growing list of social networking sites. In such a situation where you are unable to obtain the desired username, you will have to settle for your 2nd preference which may hurt your identity and social network presence.

By entering only a username, NameChk can instantly show you if your desired/branded username is available at various social networking sites.

Popular URL shortening service http://tr.im was offline for a number of hours today. Millions of URL links were broken and users were redirected to a error page (image below). It begs the question - should you host/manage your own URL shortening service or rely on a 3rd party?

What happens if the URL shortening site goes out of business, or changes their URL format some day? It is not out of the realm of possibility that any of the major players in URL shortening could go the way of 1000's of other web companies and just disappear. Even if the service goes down for a short time, (like we have seen recently) the users who have clicked on the link get lost.

These URL shortening services are causing network congestion by adding an extra HTTP request to every URL that is processed by them. One by one these are not problems, but by the millions they can make a notable dent in networking throughput, strain on hardware, and eventually, increased costs of keeping networking hardware healthy.

The shortened URLs can be easily shared and distributed in websites, forums, blogs, Instant Messengers, SMS and especially in social media service providers like Twitter, which allows users to post only 140 characters.

How else are you going to share links on Twitter without having the URL take up half the message?

TinyURL, Bit.ly, tr.im are some of the popular sites that offer URL shortening service. The shortened URL offers various advantages including easy management of links, promotion of sharing of site link, compile click data and a useful user interface.

Some URL shortening service providers offer valuable data like live click data, geographic location, webpage link from where the site link was clicked, and more. This data can be used to understand where your visitors are coming from and their interest.